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Thursday, October 8

I see a light...

Bryce's CT scan showed good results, his ventricles are smaller than a week ago and his shunt is functioning properly.

It's looking like we just might be getting to take this sweet little boy home someday soon. And by soon I mean hopefully in the next month.

Right now Bryce is on 2 liters of oxygen, he'll need to get that number down to less than one and hopefully none first. Also, he's currently taking close to half of his feeds by mouth. He'll need to be taking them all by mouth in order to go home.

The ophthalmologist is coming every two days now to watch Bryce's eyes. They are concerned about ROP (retinopothy of prematurity) which can vary from needing glasses to blindness. Bryce's eyes are maturing very slowly so it'll likely be two weeks before we know the extent of his eye issues and what will need to be done, if anything, for them. His eyes will have to stabilize before we can take him home though.

We did our infant CPR training today, so that's out of the way. We'll have to bring in his car seat closer to going home so he can sit in it for an hour. They call this a car seat study and it's to verify that he doesn't have any trouble breathing while in his car seat. Then we'll room in for a couple of nights to prove that we are capable of caring for all of his needs, make a bajillion specialist follow up appointments for the following weeks and load him in our car!!

Needless to say, we are ecstatic but equally terrified. We are so comfortable here in the confines of the NICU where if there is ever any question there is a team of professionals standing by to answer, instruct or demonstrate. What will we do when we're all alone with the precious baby in our own home? I tell ya what. We'll love him and spoil him and spend a lot of time just being. Especially since he's not supposed to leave the house much for a couple of months anyway, being so vulnerable to illness. But that is okay with us, just a good excuse to hog him all to ourselves!

So the only thing we have left to do is finally have his baby shower. Funny, we cancelled the first one because he spoiled our grand plans of a weekend at the lake with friends and family by coming well before the shower date. Now we've finally planned another for Oct. 24 and we're beginning to wonder if we shouldn't have planned it a month ago - we might be home by now if we had. Since, it seems, Bryce is determined to foil all of our grand plans.

In my heart of hearts though I think he'll be home after that but I won't put anything past our little guy. Ever. And please remind me of that in ten or so years.

Here's a hodge podge of video from the last week so you can see how cute, ehh umm, I mean how well our little Bryce is doing...

I'm ecstatic for you guys! This has been a long bumpy road for all of you. I've never seen a little one fight so hard in all my life. Bryce is truly a blessing. His story proves that miracles do happen and gives hope to all the other families out there going through a similar situation.

When you take him home, you won't want to put him down. You and Caleb are just going to hold him, kiss, and love him to no end. HOWEVER, you can't hog him when you have visitors! I'm ready to hold my cutie pie nephew! :)